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How Millennials Feel About Data Targeting and Online Privacy

With the turn of the new millennium, young adults were cleverly dubbed Millennials. Millennials are strange people: a generation that just kind of missed out on a lot, while being given the burden of experiencing, first-hand, the tragedy of the economic crisis. They milked every last bit of artistic ability and creativity right out of the nineties and, in turn, produced Facebook and Spotify. This is the generation that learned how to make money by exploiting human interest.

I just made a lot of that up, but let’s see what Millennials have to say about advertising on the internet!

Have you ever been on the internet, and somehow, the ads lining the sides of the page seemed strangely specific to you? It couldn’t be anything other than wizards, right? Wrong. It’s personalized targeting that analyzes your activity on certain websites and appropriately generates ads based on your interests. (Let your fear of this kind of technology becoming sentient sink in for a minute.) 67% of Millennials say that they’re cool with this as long as it’s relevant information. 64% said that it just makes them feel uneasy. I agree with the latter. I mean, there’s really nothing private on the internet, but it would be nice to not feel like I’m being watched.

95% of Millennials claim to have taken action to protect their online privacy, which is good. Everyone needs to be looking after themselves, especially on the internet, since identity theft is a thing. That still blows my mind. Someone can take your life away over the internet. At least 95% of the Millennials are safe, right? [via]